2007. These interconnected stories follow Ilka from "Her First American" to her life after Carter Bayoux in Connecticut. She gets a job at the Concordance Institute, a think tank at on the campus of Concordance University. Her ongoing search for friends and family and understanding Americans is just as amusing as before. Some of the characters from Segal's new book, "Half the Kingdom," make their first appearance here. It's a community of mostly secular, Jewish intellectuals with a few WASPs thrown in. Ilka gets married, has a baby and embarks on an affair with her best friend's husband. The others have marital spats and struggle to publish their books. They have endless dinners and cocktail parties. What makes it so good is Segal's acute observations about people's behavior. I would compare her to Raymond Carver, except less masculine and not working class. Awesome stuff. ( )

Picked this up after hearing a Lore Segal piece “The Reverse Bug” featured on the New Yorker fiction podcast. That story is in this collection, and it is far better than all of its companions. Unfortunately I couldn’t relate to these characters and the stories are downright boring for long stretches. ( )

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"The thirteen interrelated stories of Shakespeare's Kitchen, several of which appeared in The New Yorker, are about the longing for friendship, how we achieve new intimacies for ourselves, and how slowly, inexplicably, we can lose them." "Ilka Weisz has accepted a junior position at the Concordance Institute, a Connecticut think tank, but leaves her New York circle of friends reluctantly. After the comedy of her struggle to meet new people, Ilka comes to embrace, and be embraced by, a new set of acquaintances, including the institute's director, Leslie Shakespeare, and his wife, Eliza. Through a series of memorable dinner parties, afternoon picnics, and Sunday brunches, Segal evokes the subtle humor of the outsider's loneliness, the comfort and charm of familiar companionship, the bliss of being in love, and the strangeness of our behavior in the face of other people's deaths."--BOOK JACKET.… (more)